I’ve been using Open Office for about a month now, because I cannot afford to upgrade to the brand-new, and terribly confusing MS Office.  I’ve found Open Office surprisingly powerful and flexible.  OO is a suite of programs intended to replace-or at least replicate-the MS Office Suite.  Office has a word processor, presentation software, a spreadsheet program, a database program, and much more.  Because my field is writing, I’ve spent most of my time with the word processor, so here’s my take on it.

The strength of the OO Writer program is that it can read nearly any kind of text file, no matter what utility created it.  I imagine that, as new text editing programs emerge, OO will add plug-ins enabling the Writer to read them as well.  This power makes writer woth its weight in gold.  With the Writer, I can import, edit, and save text documents so that they will function in nearly every word processing platform.

One of the drawbacks of Writer that I’ve discovered is that though it can import nearly all text files, sometimes it interprets the special functions within those text files incorrectly.  Bullet points, tables, and images in particular at times appear in Writer awkwardly, but with a little adjustment, I have found that I can customize their look fairly easily.  This is a design weakness that I really don’t mind a great deal, because I have not had to pay a dime to use Writer.

So, in these trying economic times, maybe instead of upgraded to the fancy new MS Office, you might try an unconventional approach.  Try Open Office, and I think that you’ll discover an incredible value at exactly the right price.  Have any of you tried OO?  What are your thoughts?

 So, here’s the experiment.  Tomorrow, I am going to prepare a packaged e-mail detailing my services and providing links to my portfolio to local advertising and PR firms in my area.  I am going to send a simple inquiry and describe my rates and aptitudes, and see just how seriously these people will take me.

What do you think? Any other ideas I should apply as I experiment with this strategy?

Many clients haven’t really considered this question, and sometimes they don’t really understand what I mean by the question.  Often, I’ll ask that question in another, more subtle way. “What is your business climate like? Are you very professionally dressed when you come to the office? or Do you dress business casual on a daily basis?”  These questions help me as a writer to tailor my style to the climate of the office that I am writing for.

Knowing this helps me to choose the appropriate vocabulary and writing style for the job.  If someone works in a very formally professional environment, I am probably not going to write content for them that contains a number of contractions, or that refers to the reader.  Likewise, if I’m writing for a more casual client, I want to choose words and sentence structures that convey this message to my client.

The client I was working with conveyed to me that her most important style consideration had to do with the fast pace of her business.  This was the key to the writing choice that I made for her project.  I decided that the style I would use for this project was very specifically concise.  Since her readers don’t have a lot of time on their hands, it is probably best that I break things down into the bulleted list and easy to read text.

Knowing where my clients stand in regard to style is crucial to my business, and if I didn’t ask these questions, it would limit my flexibility and ultimately I would face confusing and circular conversations regarding the content that I had produced for my client.  By taking care of these style questions before I begin, I handle lots of problems ahead of time.

As with all my proposals via Elance, I placed a link to this site as a portfolio reference to prospective clients.  I don’t know why, but I was shocked to find out that this client actually visited the site and read my content!  Fortunately, I’ve been posting ideas lately that I’ve been very proud of, but I often consider what would have happened if I’d been having an off week.

What if I hadn’t posted in a month or so?  What if I had posted, but it was some nonesense personal rambling that had no focus and no point?  What if I had posted something with poor grammar and spelling?  Chances are, when my prospective client saw such content, he would have just kept on walking, looking at other, more professional proposals.  It is important that I am always mindful that people are watching, even when I am not aware of it.

What is a personal pronoun?  Pronouns are words that take the place of nouns.  Words like them, it, and her are pronouns.  These words add variety to our sentence structure because we aren’t forced to repeat ourselves.  Consider, for example, the difference between these sentences:

Pedro ran for student body president, and Pedro won handily.
Pedro ran for student body president, and he won handily.

The second sentence reads much more smoothly because the pronoun “he” takes the place of the noun “Pedro.”  The first sentence sounds redundant, and the second has much more variety.

Personal pronouns can cause problems in our academic writing, however.  When we write an essay or paper for class, it is important that we pay attention to the personal pronouns that we use.  It is very important that we never refer to the reader with the personal pronoun “you.”  For example:

When considering the text of Nostradamus, you can clearly observe…

Instead:
When considering the text of Nostradamus, one can clearly observe…

The second sentence functions better in an academic paper because it achieves a level of academic distance from the reader.  It is important that you as a scholar present a tone of authority, and one of the easiest ways that you can acheive that tone in your academic writing is by avoiding the use of pronouns that refer directly to the reader.  Take notice of your “yous” in your writing, and by eliminating them, you can easily employ an academic and scholarly tone.

Most us don’t text on nifty “QWERTY” phones - although the Blackberry is certainly gaining steam in the market - so we’ve intuitively learned an important technique that, if we were aware of it, can immensely improve our writing.  Becausw we don’t want to type incredibly long words or phrases on our numeric phone keypads, we’ve learned to eliminate needless words or phrases.  Though we often text using poor grammar and spelling, we can still take some of the skills we us on the cell phone and transfer them into our formal writing.

Shakespeare wrote that “brevity is the soul of wit.”  This means, in other words, that the most effective messages are communicated with the least amount of words.  Often when we write formally, we use too many words and unneccessary phrases to communicate our point.  When we text message, to avoid confusion, tired thumbs, and texting limits, we create concise messages designed to communicate one un-distracted point.

When you write, try to take the skills you’ve developed in text messaging and transfer them onto the page.  Don’t use ten words in a sentence when five will communicate the same point.  Through brevity, your writing will stand out as profound and powerful.  You already have these skills because of your phone, so why not use them for good instead of evil?

The remarkable thing that I’ve noticed lately is that quite the opposite seems to be happening.  While one might expect that the freelancing world would be struggling with the same economic problems as everyone else, most freelancers that I speak to are experiencing incredible growth in their personal businesses.  The economy might be falling down around our ears, but success is far from elusive for the freelancer.  As the economy falters and wrestles to regain its strength, you’ll be succeeding as a freelancer for five reasons.

You know how to market yourself.  If you have had any success in freelance business, you implicitly understand the power of unconventional marketing methods.  Most of us don’t have huge advertising budgets, but we leverage the power of social networking, both online and off, to promote our services.  The freelance world thrives on collaboration, and the most powerful freelancers are those who have the “right connections.”  So, while conventional businesses have to cut their advertising budgets in order to stay solvent, you’ll rely on the same advertising method that has consistently worked for you: the power of your colleagues.

You are flexible.  Nearly every freelancer that I know has incredible flexibility in vision.  They are quick to evaluate the success or failure of current projects and adjust their business plan appropriately.  Unlike bulky larger businesses, a freelancer realizes very quickly when a business strategy is not working, and instead of stubbornly sticking to a failing business plan, you quickly adjust your approach to maximize your long-term success.  You may have started as a freelance writer, but because of circumstances, you find yourself in the freelance web-design business mere months later.   I can think of no company, large or small, with the ability to reinvent itself with that kind of speed and efficiency.

You are efficient.  Regardless the business, any size company struggles with keeping its workers productive.  As a freelancer, your productivity is the lifeblood of your profitability.  If you don’t get things done, you don’t get paid.  While employees of a company often lack a sense of urgency in completing tasks, you realize that your time is money, and you make each moment of your day count toward the success of your business.  Your clients can rely on your ability to meet deadlines, because you rarely allow other concerns to get in the way of your work.

You are self-reliant. Most of us as freelancers aren’t saddled with huge business loans or office leasing contracts.  Instead, our overhead costs are low because we don’t rely on credit to determine our profitability.  The credit market may fall to pieces all around us, but we will still be humming along very successfully because we are not debt-dependant.  Our freedom from traditional business expenses helps us rely on the right source for our success-our own initiative-and we don’t have to worry about making enough money just to cover our huge debts.  We can simply worry about working to achieve better profitability.

You are portable.   Typically, we conduct our freelance work by way of the Internet, and this particular aspect of our business makes us extremely portable.  We are not, as freelancers, bound to one locale to make our living.  If the economy is struggling in one part of the world, we can very readily shift our business focus to a more profitable locale with successful clientele.  You will continue to be successful because the business climate of the region that you live in will not be the determining factor for your productivity.

These five factors make a freelancer’s success virtually guaranteed, regardless of the economy and its ups-and-downs.  Because you have these and many more essential freelance qualities, you will find your business growing by leaps and bounds while more conventional business models have to downsize and downgrade.